Can your home school survive developing a thriving home business? We believe it can! Here is a mix of encouragement and tips from veteran homeschooling mom Susan Critelli on successfully mixing Home Business with home schooling.

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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Am I the only one who has a hard time blogging regularly?

It seems like no matter how hard I try, I can't get it together to blog regularly on this blog.

It isn't because I am no longer interested in homeschooling. I even added a curated blog to the mix a few months ago called "Homeschooling," in which I scour the web for articles of interest to those who are currently homeschooling or investigating homeschooling. You can see a little scrolling box in the right sidebar that shows recent article selections. The fact that I am no longer personally homeschooling is irrelevant.

It isn't because I am no longer interested in home business. I do social media consulting and have a direct sales business on the side, AND I have added a networking group to the mix in the last year to help local business owners form collaborative relationships. Cup of Coffee Networkers is a mix of brick-and-mortar small business owners, service providers, and home business owners involved in a variety of direct sales companies. We meet twice a week and even have an online meeting on Wednesday afternoons.

It isn't because I am no longer interested in writing. I love to write. I always manage to put in my two cents (or 25 cents) on each post I add to Homeschooling or the Cup of Coffee Networkers blog I started to showcase my local members here in NJ. OK, maybe the fact that I am managing some blogs for clients and writing for them eats into my desire to write.

It just seems like so many other things crowd in to fill up my day. So, how do you make time to write? I would be glad to have any advice you could give me, and would be thrilled for you to leave your nugget of wisdom in the comments.

If you are a new visitor, welcome! Here are links to some of my favorite (ok, old) articles for you to check out and see if this is a blog you might want to revisit if I could ever get my act together and write something.

I write at night then edit/publish in the mornings. Or schedule the post to get published in the mornings. Sure, like anyone else, I experience a little burn-out. But for me, all that really means is I need to change my routine, my atmosphere. It's not for a lack of ideas that I get stuck, I just have a hard time articulating them in writing. So yes, I"ll pace around the room talking to myself until it finally comes out :-P

I absolutely feel your pain and am in the same predicament. I started out blogging four times a week and lasted three months doing that. Now, I blog about once a week. I found that life starting to crowd in more than usual...but I'm getting energized again. One thing that helped me is by re-designing my blog to give it a fresher look. But keep at it...we'll get over this hurdle.

We made a conscious decision to limit outside activities and scheduled in time with family. We also limited TV - my daughter didn't even know the TV did anything until she was about 5 because we never had it on during the day! There were a certain amount of extracurricular activities that were necessary for socialization purposes, but we didn't take on anything that took up too much time: no travel sports, for instance.

Cell phones were pretty primitive and nobody thought it was weird if you didn't have one, and certainly not if your kid didn't have one. The internet was not as ever present as it is now, and a lot of people didn't even have it, so again, there was less distraction from that up until the very late 1990s - early 2000's.

Things are very different, and for that matter, I am different. Honestly, I am not sure how I would do it now.

To paraphrase another blogger (Mark Murnahan), some of us are just born with the affliction of not having as much time as everyone else - we only have 23 hours in each day! Seriously, it's just a matter of reminding yourself why you do it and then making the time. (I suffer from it, too.)

It's definitely hard to keep up with blogging. Sometimes I'll go a week without writing anything, but then will crank out a few at once and space out the dates. Once I get in a groove and start writing, other posts usually flow easily, so I recommend trying to do a few at once if you have the opportunity :)

No, you're not the only one! It takes a lot of work to blog consistently. I like what Tim Ferris (author of the Four Hour Workweek) does. He posts sporadically, but consistently strong posts. For him, it's quality that's more important than consistency, and it works.

Ultimately, you need to have some consistency, but it doesn't need to be daily or even weekly. The more important factor is that you're creating unique, quality content that strikes a nerve.

You're definitely not the only one with this problem. like Jeff said, it is hard work. And if you combine consistency (monthly, weekly, or even daily), with quality then your work is not just doubled but increased exponentially.

I don't have time to write, but I make time to write and I have a set of processes that help me with it. I keep notes so that when I have time to write I have topics and ideas, then I might develop a post over the span of 3 or 4 writing sessions. This helps a lot when you have 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there.

And don't believe the hype about "the tools don't matter" get good tools that help your process of writing. For example, I blog from home on my computer in my office, on my iPad from my bed, when out and about, from my phone. Two indispensable tools that allow me to do this are Dropbox and Evernote, check them out.